1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system for detecting failures in a loudspeaker system.
2. Related Art
In recent years, the popularity of multimedia loudspeaker systems, particularly those that can be connected to sound sources such as home computers, have gained widespread popularity. As these products are shipped worldwide, increased system complexity has heightened the chance of hardware failures ranging from dropouts of audio and extraneous noises, to complete loss of sound from one or all of the speakers. Other system failures may result from manufacturing defects, user misassembly, or mishandling. Other hardware failures may involve the sound card, the computer, or the speaker system (speaker module). When such failures occur, customer dissatisfaction may result and potentially costly field returns may occur. If a user is not technically proficient, the user may be unable to determine the exact nature of a failure. Worse yet, the user may erroneously determine that the computer system is faulty. In such a case, replacing the computer or a component that has been wrongfully diagnosed will not correct the problem. This, of course, just adds to customer dissatisfaction, along with the cost of trying to solve the problem.
Soundcards from Creative Technology, Ltd., and others have tried sound failure detecting systems to diagnose problems. Such a soundcard system has a resident program on the card that generates audio signals that may be cycled among all of the speakers. The drawback with this approach is that if there is no audio signal at the speakers, it is impossible to determine accurately whether a failure resides in the sound card or in any of the speaker components. Thus, there exists a need for a system that can isolate and localize a failure within a loudspeaker system.